“I found our conversation of last night most interesting,” he said a trifle pompously. “‘As long as we are among humans, let us be humane,’ as Seneca would say, and good conversation is truly the most humane of all arts. Particularly necessary in barbaric settings like these.”

I stifled a grin as I nudged my horse up beside his. So the young bugger was lonely. Tribunes did tend to keep to each other for company, since no one else particularly needed them, and Tribune Six-Names here had been on the road several weeks without a friend. He ignored the reproving scowl of the centurion on his other side and pressed for a little of my history, riding along sniffing the rain-washed air with as much pleasure as any legionary on a pleasant march. The horses’ hooves clopped cleanly on the road, and everywhere was the smell of wet earth and leaves that hadn’t yet been deadened by the approaching winter.

“So you came all the way from Britannia just to join the legions?” he said after hearing my (carefully edited) life story. With all the interesting parts left out, like the Emperors I’d helped to kill and the bouts in the arena that I’d fought, it made short telling. “I don’t mean to be rude—but in the name of all the gods, why?”

“I’ve asked myself that a time or two.” Particularly in the first year, when I was getting poked and weighed and measured by critical recruiters, or slogging through sword drills I’d mastered at eight years old, or gritting my teeth as centurions shouted at me about the point beating the edge, you gladiator-trained scum—and let me tell you, they were not nearly as kind about that last point as Emperor Trajan had been.

Why had I joined the legions? I was twenty-five now, and I still didn’t know. But I’d finally broadened into my height; I had scars on my back from the odd caning and was hoping to get a few scars on my front from battle wounds; I had friends in the ranks who were like brothers, and a place in the world. Like it or not, I was a soldier of Rome, Vercingetorix of the Tenth Fidelis, and even now I had to grit my teeth when I thought how right Sabina had been—that it had been the place for me all along.

“Have to do something with this life,” I said finally, and it was all the answer I could give.

“Pity to get stuck in Germania, though,” he sympathized. “I was hoping for Africa. Some place very hot and thoroughly uneventful.”